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Getting Started with Genestack Monitoring

This guide walks you through setting up a complete monitoring stack for your Genestack deployment. The monitoring system consists of three main layers: metrics collection, visualization, and alerting.

Overview

The Genestack monitoring stack includes:

  • Prometheus - Time-series database and metrics collection engine
  • Grafana - Visualization and dashboards
  • AlertManager - Alert routing and notification management
  • Metric Exporters - Service-specific metrics collection for OpenStack components

Prerequisites

Before proceeding, ensure you have:

  • A running Genestack deployment
  • Helm 3.x installed
  • Access to your Kubernetes cluster with appropriate permissions

Step 1: Install the Prometheus Stack

The kube-prometheus-stack is the foundation of your monitoring infrastructure. It deploys and manages the core monitoring components.

Install Prometheus, which includes:

  • Prometheus Operator - Manages the Prometheus cluster deployment lifecycle
  • Prometheus Server - Collects and stores metrics from configured targets
  • AlertManager - Handles alerts sent by Prometheus and routes them to notification channels (email, PagerDuty, Slack, etc.)
  • Node Exporter - Collects hardware and OS-level metrics from cluster nodes
  • Kube State Metrics - Exposes Kubernetes cluster state metrics

See the Prometheus installation guide for detailed setup instructions.

Step 2: Install Grafana

Grafana provides visualization dashboards for your metrics, alerts, and logs.

Install Grafana to:

  • Create custom dashboards for monitoring OpenStack services
  • Visualize metrics collected by Prometheus
  • Set up alert notifications and integrations
  • Analyze logs and trace data

For more information about Grafana's capabilities, visit the Grafana.

Step 3: Deploy Service-Specific Metric Exporters

With the core monitoring stack in place, deploy exporters to collect metrics from your OpenStack services and infrastructure components. All exporters are available for easy deployment.

Step 4: Configure AlertManager

Configure AlertManager to send notifications when alerts are triggered. Available integrations include:

  • Slack Alerts - Send alerts to Slack channels
  • Email notifications
  • PagerDuty integration
  • Webhook receivers

Step 5: Customize Alerting Rules

Custom Alerting Rules

Genestack includes default alerting rules that can be customized for your environment. To view or modify the custom rules:

less /etc/genestack/helm-configs/prometheus/alerting_rules.yaml

Edit this file to add, modify, or remove alerting rules based on your operational requirements.

Operator-Provided Alerting Rules

Many Genestack operators come with built-in ServiceMonitor and PodMonitor resources that automatically:

  • Expose scrape endpoints for metrics collection
  • Provide pre-configured alerting rules tailored to the specific service

These operator-managed rules are curated for best practices and don't require manual configuration. For service-specific monitoring details, refer to the individual service documentation. For example: RabbitMQ Operator Monitoring.

Next Steps

Once your monitoring stack is deployed:

  1. Access Grafana - Log in to Grafana and explore the pre-built dashboards
  2. Verify Metrics Collection - Check that Prometheus is successfully scraping all targets
  3. Test Alerting - Trigger a test alert to verify AlertManager configuration
  4. Create Custom Dashboards - Build dashboards specific to your operational needs
  5. Tune Alert Thresholds - Adjust alerting rules based on your environment's baseline behavior